Blood Lite II: Overbite by Kelley Armstrong Read Free Book Online

But I thought you wanted to know about the werewolf.”
    Booster pursed his lips. WWFD? He appealed to the picture of Sigmund hanging above the fireplace. The picture offered no answers.
    “Tyler, with your consent, I’d like to try some hypnotherapy. Have you ever been hypnotized?”
    Tyler shook his head. Booster dimmed the lights and sat alongside the couch. He held his pencil in front of Tyler’s face at eye level.
    “Take a deep breath, then let it out. Focus on the pencil . . .”
    It took a few minutes to bring Tyler to a state of susceptible relaxation.
    “Can you hear me, Tyler?”
    “Yes.”
    The boy’s jaw was slack, and a thin line of drool escaped the corner of his mouth. Booster was surprised at the child’s halitosis—perhaps he had been eating squirrels after all.
    “I’d like you to go back to two weeks ago. When you were burying Crazy Harold.”
    “Okay.”
    “Tell me what you see.”
    “It’s cold. There are a lot of rocks in the dirt, and the shovel won’t go in very far.”
    Booster used his penlight to check Tyler’s pupils. Slow response. The child was under.
    “What were you digging?”
    “Grave. For the vampire.”
    Booster frowned. He’d studied cases of patients lying under hypnosis, but had never encountered one in person.
    “What about the werewolf?”
    “Came out of the field. It was big, had red eyes, walked on two legs.”
    “And it bit you?”
    “Yeah. I thought it was going to kill me, but Runs Like Stallion saved me.”
    “Runs Like Stallion?”
    “He’s a ghost. He used to be a Sioux brave. The field is an old Indian burial ground.”
    Booster decided he’d had enough. He wrote “treatment” in his notebook and went over to his desk, unlocking the top drawer. The metallic case practically leaped up at him. He took it over to Tyler.
    “Tyler, your parents are tired of these stories.”
    “My parents are dead.”
    “No, Tyler. They aren’t dead. They care about you. That’s why they brought you to me.”
    Booster opened the case. The gnerlock blinked its three eyes and crawled into Booster’s hand. It would enter Tyler’s mouth and burrow up into his brain, taking over his body. Tyler was a tad bit young, and the gnerlock would be cramped living in the boy’s skull, but psychiatry wasn’t a perfect science.
    “Soon, it will all be better. You’ll have no more worries. You’re going to be a host, Tyler, for the new dominant species on this planet. Are you scared?”
    “No.”
    “Open your mouth, Tyler.”
    Tyler stretched his mouth wide. Wider than humanly possible. And Booster was alarmed to see it was crammed with sharp teeth.
    The gnerlock nesting in the doctor’s brain popped out through his neck after the wolf decapitated the host body. Its eleven legs beelined for the door, antennae waving hysterically, telepathically cursing that quack, Freud.
    Halfway there, a ghostly moccasin came down on the alien’s oblong head, smashing it into the carpeting.
    Runs Like Stallion gave the wolf a thumbs-up, but Tyler was already leaping out the window, vulpine eyes locked on a juicy squirrel in the grass below.

Dead Clown Séance
    CHRISTOPHER WELCH
    Clem’s mobile home was strewn with shadows. The sole luminescence came from four candles centered on the table. The flames stretched upward as their amber brightness reflected off the clowns’ pasty faces.
    Clem, Toodles, Oswald Osgood, and Beeps held hands, forming a circle around the tapers. The poof-ball at the peak of Clem’s conical hat was almost invisible in the surrounding darkness. Toodles tilted her head back so her frizzy green hair would not catch the flames. Oswald’s tramp clothing and hobo makeup made him appear more frightened than he felt. Beeps had placed his bicycle horn on the table within easy reach.
    Oswald wanted to say If Lon Chaney had seen us by candlelight first, he might have altered his famous comment about clowns in moonlight , but he kept that thought to himself.
    Clem was a